UNT Theses and Dissertations - 92 Matching Results

Search Results

Results: 1 - 24 next
open access

Laying the foundation for successful non-academic writing: Professional communication principles in the K-5 curricula of the McKinney Independent School District.

Description: Traditionally, K-5 students' writing has had a primarily academic aim-to help students master concepts and express themselves. Even if students take a professional writing course later, they typically do not have the opportunity to practice-over the long period of time mastery requires-the non-academic writing skills they will be required to use as part of their jobs and in their civic life. Based on a limited K-5 study, Texas' McKinney Independent School District is doing a good job of prepari… more
Date: December 2009
Creator: Treviño, Marlea
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Map and the Territory in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Description: In this dissertation, Wallace Stevens' imagination-reality problem as depicted in his poetry is discussed in terms of an eco-critical map-territory divide. Stevens's metaphor of "the necessary angel" acts to mediate human necessity, the map, with natural necessity, the territory, in order to retain contact with changing cultural and environmental conditions. At stake in this mediation are individual freedom and the pertinence of the imagination to the experience of reality. In Chapter 2, the at… more
Date: December 2009
Creator: Thompson, Erik Robb
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Personal Properties: Stage Props and Self-Expression in British Drama, 1600-1707

Description: This dissertation examines the role of stage properties-props, slangily-in the construction and expression of characters' identities. Through readings of both canonical and non-canonical drama written between 1600 and 1707-for example, Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of Titus Andronicus (1678), Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1677)-I demonstrate how props mediate relationships between people. The control … more
Date: December 2009
Creator: Bender, Ashley Brookner
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Politics of Sympathy: Secularity, Alterity, and Subjectivity in George Eliot's Novels

Description: This study examines the practical and political implications of sympathy as a mode of achieving the intercommunicative relationship between the self and the other, emphasizing the significance of subjective agency not simply guided by the imperative category of morality but mainly enacted by a hybrid of discourses through the interaction between the two entities. Scenes of Clerical Life, Eliot's first fictional narrative on illuminating the intertwining relation of religion to secular condition… more
Date: December 2009
Creator: Koo, Seung-Pon
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Always Painting the Future: Utopian Desire and the Women's Movement in Selected Works by United States Female Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Description: This study explores six utopias by female authors written at the turn of the twentieth century: Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora (1881), Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant's Unveiling Parallel (1893), Eloise O. Richberg's Reinstern (1900), Lena J. Fry's Other Worlds (1905), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), and Martha Bensley Bruère's Mildred Carver, USA (1919). While the right to vote had become the central, most important point of the movement, women were concerned with many other is… more
Date: August 2009
Creator: Balic, Iva
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Fictionalized Indian English Speech and the Representations of Ideology in Indian Novels in English

Description: I investigate the spoken dialogue of four Indian novels in English: Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable (1935), Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956), Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan's The World of Nagaraj (1990), and Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters (2002). Roger Fowler has said that literature, as a form of discourse, articulates ideology; it is through linguistic criticism (combination of literary criticism and linguistic analyses) that the ideologies in a literary text are uncovered. Shobhana … more
Date: August 2009
Creator: Muthiah, Kalaivahni
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

God's Perfect Timing

Description: When I was thirty-three years old, I discovered I was an adoptee. In this memoir of secrecy and love, betrayal and redemption, I reflect on my early experiences as a doted-on only child firmly rooted in the abundant love of my adoptive family, my later struggles with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, my marriage to a fellow-adoptee, my discovery of my own adoption and the subsequent reunion with my birth family, my navigation through the thrills and tensions of newly complicated fam… more
Date: August 2009
Creator: Rizzo, Steven
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Sacred and the Profane: Nin, Barnes, and the Aesthetics of Amorality

Description: Barnes's Vagaries Malicieux, and Nin's Delta of Venus, are examples the developing vision of female sex, and both authors use their literary techniques to accomplish their aesthetic vision of amorality. Nin's visions are based on her and her friends' extreme experiences. Her primary concern was expressing her erotic and amorally aesthetic gaze, and the results of her efforts are found in her aesthetic vision of Paris and the amoral lifestyle. Barnes uses metaphor and linguistics to fashion her … more
Date: August 2009
Creator: Dunbar, Erin
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Transnational Compositionality and Hemon, Shteyngart, Díaz; A No Man's Land, Etc.

Description: Contemporary transnational literature presents a unique interpretive problem, due to new methods of language and culture negotiation in the information age. The resulting condition, transnational compositionality, is evidenced by specific linguistic artifacts; to illustrate this I use three American novels as a case study: Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. By extension, many conventional literary elements are… more
Date: August 2009
Creator: Miner, Joshua D.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Museum of Coming Apart

Description: This dissertation comprises two parts: Part I, which discusses use of second person pronoun in contemporary American poetry; and Part II, The Museum of Coming Apart, which is a collection of poems. As confessional verse became a dominant mode in American poetry in the late 1950s and early 60s, so too did the use of the first-person pronoun. Due in part to the excesses of later confessionalism, however, many contemporary poets hesitate to use first person for fear that their work might be read … more
Date: May 2009
Creator: Lee, Bethany Tyler
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Rhetorical Transformations of Trees in Medieval England: From Material Culture to Literary Representation

Description: Literary texts of medieval England feature trees as essential to the individual and communal identity as it intersects with nature, and the compelling qualities and organic processes associated with trees help vernacular writers interrogate the changing nature of this character. The early depiction of trees demonstrates an intimacy with nature that wanes after the tenth-century monastic revival, when the representation of trees as living, physical entities shifts toward their portrayal as alleg… more
Date: December 2008
Creator: Grimes, Jodi Elisabeth
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Politics of Translation: Authorship and Authority in the Writings of Alfred the Great

Description: The political implications of the OE prose translations of King Alfred (849-899) are overlooked by scholars who focus on the literary merits of the texts. When viewed as propaganda, Alfred's writings show a careful reshaping of their Latin sources that reaffirms Alfred's claim to power. The preface to Pastoral Care, long understood to be the inauguration of Alfred's literary reforms, is invested with highly charged language and a dramatic reinvention of English history, which both reestablishe… more
Date: August 2008
Creator: Crumbley, Allex
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Shared Spaces: The Human and the Animal in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, and Jack London

Description: Living in tune with nature means respecting the natural environment and realizing its power and the ways it manifests in daily life. This essay focuses on the ways in which respect for nature is expressed through animal imagery in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mark Twain's "The Stolen White Elephant," Roughing It, and Pudd'nhead Wilson, and Jack London's The Call of the Wild. Each author encouraged readers to seek the benefits of nature in order to become better human being… more
Date: August 2008
Creator: Harper, Pamela Evans
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

What Do You Do? A Memoir in Essays

Description: These personal essays present a twenty-something's evolving attitudes toward her occupations. Each essay explores a different job-from birthday party clown, to seitan-maker, to psychiatric den mother-while circling around sub-themes of addiction, disability, sex, love, nature, and nourishment (both food and otherwise). Through landscape, extended metaphor and symbol, and recurring characters, the collection addresses how a person's work often defines how she sees the world. Each of the narrator… more
Date: August 2008
Creator: Keckler, Kristen A.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Libertines Real and Fictional in Rochester, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Boswell

Description: Libertines Real and Fictional in Rochester, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Boswell examines the Restoration and eighteenth-century libertine figure as it appears in John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester's Satyr against Mankind, "The Maim'd Debauchee," and "Upon His Drinking a Bowl," Thomas Shadwell's The Libertine, William Wycherley's The Country Wife, and James Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763. I argue that the limitations and self-contradictions of standard definitions of libertinism and the wa… more
Date: May 2008
Creator: Smith, Victoria
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Paradox and Balance in the Anglo-Saxon Mind of Beowulf

Description: This essay argues that the Anglo-Saxon poet of Beowulf presents the reader with a series of paradoxes and attempts to find a balance within these paradoxes. At the forefront is the paradox of past and present, explored through the influence of the past on the characters in the poem as well as the poet. Additionally, the poem offers the paradox of light and dark, which ultimately suggests light and dark as symbols of Christianity and paganism. Finally, the land and the sea offer the third prima… more
Date: May 2008
Creator: Fox, Bonnie L.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

AGenesis: A Novel

Description: AGenesis is a novel of "postmortal fiction" set entirely in an afterlife. Nessie, a recently dead woman, accidentally kills an already-dead man, and in the confusion that follows, sets out to discover how he could have died and what after-afterlife he might have gone to. During her travels, she is raped and then help captive by a city of tormented souls; she descends into madness until rescued by children, and she and her newborn but "undead" daughter set out again, this time to find the end … more
Date: December 2007
Creator: Snoek-Brown, Samuel Jeremiah
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Comparison of Morris' News from Nowhere and Life in the Twin Oaks Community

Description: It is the purpose of this paper to explore how Morris' novel relates to life in Twin Oaks, primarily as depicted in two books: Living the Dream (1983) by Ingrid Komar, a long-term visitor to the commune and Kinkade's Is It Utopia Yet? (1996). This comparison will demonstrate that the experiences of contemporary intentional communities such as Twin Oaks provide a meaningful context for reading News from Nowhere because of the similarities in goals and philosophy. It will further demonstrate that… more
Date: December 2007
Creator: Garner, Royce Clifton
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Human Body is Not Designed for Ambivalence: Odes

Description: The critical analysis section of this dissertation seeks to define the ode using examples in translation from Greek and Latin odes and examples in English written from the 1500s to the 2000s. Although most definitions of the ode contend that this subgenre of the lyric is an occasional poem of praise that includes a meditative or mythological element, the ode is far more complex. An ode is an occasional poem, but it works to privilege rather than strictly praise its subject, allowing for the sp… more
Date: December 2007
Creator: Walker, Tammy
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Murky Impressions of Postmodernism: Eugene Gant and Shakespearean Intertext in Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River

Description: In this study, I analyze the significance of Shakespearean intertextuality in the major works of Thomas Wolfe featuring protagonist Eugene Gant: Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River. Specifically, I explore Gant's habits and preferences as a reader by examining the narrative arising from the protagonist's perspectives of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and King Lear. I examine the significance of parallel reading habits of Wolfe the author and Gant the character. I also … more
Date: December 2007
Creator: Miller, Brenda
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Search for Cultural Identity: An Exploration of the Works of Toni Morrison

Description: Many of Toni Morrison's African-American characters attempt to change their circumstances either by embracing the white dominant culture that surrounds them or by denying it. In this thesis I explore several ways in which the characters do just that-either embrace or deny the white culture's right to dominion over them. This thesis deals primarily with five of Toni Morrison's novels: The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, Sula, and Tar Baby.
Date: December 2007
Creator: Conway, Jennifer S.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Vulgar Moon

Description: The preface to this collection, "Speculation and Silence," argues that confessional poetry remains integral to contemporary poetics, though the implications of the term have changed since its "first-generation." Confessional poetry must not be dependent on simply the transmission of sensational details and the emotional consequences, but on poets' implementation of silence and restraint in both the diffusion of ideas and in the crafting of the piece. Vulgar Moon is a collection of poems in whic… more
Date: December 2007
Creator: Miller, Kelley Reno
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Blurring the Lines Between Instructor-Led and Online Learning: an Evaluation of an Online Composition Curriculum on the Bleeding Edge

Description: The contemporary classroom currently faces an evolving world of computer based training, online courses, instructor-led learning and several blended approaches in-between. With the increased presence of computers and communication in every facet of students' lives, students have changed to adapt to the continuous presence of technology in their daily lives. These recent rapid developments have changed the relationship between technology and communication. Indeed, communication and technology ha… more
Date: August 2007
Creator: Deranger, Brant
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Detecting Masculinity: The Positive Masculine Qualities of Fictional Detectives.

Description: Detective fiction highlights those qualities of masculinity that are most valuable to a contemporary culture. In mysteries a cultural context is more thoroughly revealed than in any other genre of literature. Through the crimes, an audience can understand not only the fears of a particular society but also the level of calumny that society assigns to a crime. As each generation has needed a particular set of qualities in its defense, so the detective has provided them. Through the detective's r… more
Date: August 2007
Creator: Griswold, Amy Herring
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
Back to Top of Screen